Balloons | Page 8

sunlight--falling like a waterfall over her
shoulders. With one hand she was combing it, with the other she
fingered a bundle of snapshots taken on their honeymoon--lovely
snapshots, full of sunshine and queer, characteristic positions and
expressions. They might, she thought, have been taken by a loving
detective.
Tony came in.
"Do you remember," she said--and then, suddenly, with a wave of
misery, she realised it. The phrase did not belong to her.

V

THE MARTYR
[To H.G. WELLS]
I, myself, have always liked Delancey Woburn. To begin with, there is
something so endearing about the way he displays his defects, never
hiding them or tidying them away or covering them up. There they are
for all the world to see, a reassuring shop window full of frank
shortcomings. Besides, I never can resist triumphant vitality. Delancey
is overflowing with joie de vivre, with curiosity, with a certainty of
imminent adventure. If you say to him, "I saw a policeman," his face
lights up and so it would if you said "I saw a dog," or a cat, or a
donkey-cart. To him policemen and dogs and cats and donkey-carts are
always just about to do something dramatic or absurd or unexpected.
Nor is he discouraged by unfailing regularity in their behaviour. Faith
is "the evidence of things not seen."
And then, too, he is so very welcoming. Not, of course, that he makes
you feel you are the only person in the world because a world with only
one other person in it would be inconceivably horrible to him, but he
does make you quite sure that he is most frightfully glad to see you--all
the gladder because it is such a surprise. Delancey always makes a
point of being surprised. Also, though he is invariably in a hurry--being
in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life--he as invariably turns
round and walks with you, in your direction, to convince himself that
having met you in Jermyn Street is an altogether unexpected and
delightful adventure. And he never feels, as I always do, that a five
minutes' conversation is a stupid, embarrassing thing, too long for mere
civility and too short for anything else. The five minutes are filled to
the brim and off he rushes again, leaving me just a little more tired and
leisurely from the contact. Delancey is the life and soul of a party--or
perhaps I should say the life and body. He likes eating and drinking and
talking to women and talking to men and smoking and telling a story.
And if he does address his neighbour a little as if she were a meeting at
a bye-election, open air, he at any rate never addresses her as if she
were a duty and no one had ever wanted to kiss her.
To Delancey all women have had lovers and husbands and children and

religious conversions and railway accidents. Old maids and
clergymen's wives adore him.
I don't know what it was that made him write originally. Perhaps it was
his name--Delancey Woburn sounds like the author--or the hero--of a
serial. Or it may have been that his exuberant desire for self-expression
had burst through the four walls of practical professions. He had, I
believe, considered the stage and the church. Journalism would have
seemed to me the obvious outlet but he preferred literature. "Creation is
such fun," he would explain, beaming. And, of course, he was
tremendously successful. Delancey was designed on a pattern of
success.
That was one of the obvious defects I was talking about. Delancey has
missed his failures. He has fought and been defeated but he has never
longed and been frustrated. In his case, romance is realism. He has only
known happy endings.
Naturally he is not an interesting writer. How could he be? And,
naturally, he is a successful one. How could he help it? Delancey writes
for magazines in England and America. I, myself, never read
magazines, but occasionally he sends me one and every twenty stories
(I think it is twenty) become a book. The English ones were about
scapegraces and irresistible ne'er-do-wells, ancestral homes with frayed
carpets and faded hangings in which penniless woman-haters (the last
of a noble line) sit and brood, living alone with equally gruff,
woman-hating family retainers. Sometimes, too, there was an
absent-minded dreamer, and villainous business men worked
indefatigably in the interests of their own ultimate frustration.
But this, of course, would never do for America where there isn't a
market for ne'er-do-wells, frayed carpets inspire no glamour, and
dreamers who before the war were despised as harmless, are now
damned as dangerous. No, America must have her special line and no
one better than Delancey knew how to mix the fragrance of true love
with